A Suitable Boy Review: With Andrew Davis’ script singlehandedly limiting the cast, the series marks Mira Nair’s weakest, sloppiest and tepid directorial work in years.
My relationship with Vikram Seth’s novel A Suitable Boy started out in a vein similar to every regular Indian student; the book invariably found mention and unfailingly surfaced in general knowledge textbooks as a mandatory trivia thanks to its notoriously untameable page count. I resisted for the longest time, wary of yet another postcolonial novel grappling with post Partition aftermath. But the prospect of a Mira Nair adaptation and the cursory glimpses at the courtesan tradition the book seemed to offer pulled me towards it, which is overwrought on multiple accounts, head scramblingly and exaggeratedly specific in detailing of parliamentary procedures of land reform bills, tannery processes et all, and ultimately an extraordinary plunge into matters of the human heart. I haven’t finished it yet, but I’ll concur the book has a profound, clear-eyed and unsentimental understanding of the minutiae of 1950s India, reflected in brisk, occasionally laborious observations on the social mores of that time and a timeless sociopolitical currency considering the startling prescience with which Seth talks about the communal animosities stirred in a petri dish of lethal vengefulness by agenda driven parties on either side.
Mira is no stranger to adaptations. Both her strongest and most bland directorial work have in this tricky terrain. Among her finest is her adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, in which she successfully mined the collective emotion and experience of an entire diasporic community. In her handling of Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, that sure-footed transfer of spirit across mediums was completely amiss.
Even an absent minded rush through any episode of A Suitable Boy would be adequate to convey to you an elementary sense of the industrial scale production muscle, Nair’s single minded conviction that cut adamantly into the rarefied BBC domains, the endless negotiations she must have undertaken to actualise the most commonplace of demands to ensure ethno cultural and period authenticity . This is why it especially breaks my heart to write and lament that all that rigor and strain has eventually produced and culminated in a show that singularly lacks any form of emotional veracity and truth of the moment.
The story is about a young, sprightly girl, Lata Mehra and her mother Rupa who’s bent on finding the most suitable groom for her. This seemingly simple starting premise trails off into multiple subplots and tracks, chronicling four families- Kapoors, Chatterjees, Mehras and the Khans. The most substantial parallel plot track is the reckless young wastrel Maan’s impetuous, heady romance with the courtesan, Saeeda Bai, whose elegance and music are ensorcelling. A minister seeks to build a temple next to a mosque, inflaming communal sentiments, an episode directly drawing from the Babri Masjid demolition that catalysed intense vitriol across the religious communities. Gradually, we are introduced to Lata’s three suitors. Firstly there is the smoulderingly attractive Kabir Durrani, a Muslim student with an avid interest in cricketing and poetry who spurs a fierce passion. We meet Amit Chatterjee, the creme de la creme sophisticated poet with definitive aesthetic tastes and acumen, and then Haresh Khanna, the shoemaker who exudes a mollifying kind of reliability and an even temper. There’s a clutch of interesting characters: particularly, Lata’s sister in law Meenakshi who’s seductively perky and has frequent romantic liaisons outside her marriage. All these unfold against the backdrop of post partition 1950s India, also invoking the vitiated communal polarisation that especially steeped in the 1990s. The action moves from the fictional town of Brahmpur to Lucknow to Kolkata .
Naturally, the plotting is busy and the dive from one track to the other is frenetic, and to pack in so many angles, often intersecting, within six episodes is an almost impossible task, frankly unwise, going against the very grain of the book. The novelistic detail, which only gets translated into intricate, stupendously attentive production design by Stephanie Caroll and costume design by Arjun Bhasin, is fully absent from the characterisation. Most of the characters are truncated to mere caricatures. Especially, Rupa Mehra, an otherwise fascinating character and the still emotional centre of the book, is presented with grating, largely exasperating superficial excess by Mahira Kakkar. Her argument scene with Lata, when she discovers her daughter has been going out with a Muslim, is so annoyingly and stridently performed , exacerbated by the dullest of dialogues. In fact, it’s Andrew Davis’s script which is the biggest offender. It is culpable for limiting most actors. The confused, jagged linguistic mishmash of English, Hindi and Urdu is so ungainly almost every actor falters with inelegant accents that are instantly off-putting. The transitions between the languages should have been more fluid. Fine actors like Randeep Hooda, Vijay Raaz and Vijay Verma get too listless material and it bogs them down completely. Verma gets a big final scene that doesn’t earn itself in terms of the emotional undertow it is loaded with. In terms of emotional significance, the village subplot hardly registers and should have been completely axed from the final edit.The horrific oppressions of the zamindari system in rural India is viewed through a poorly judged , mostly ancient lens with near-to-nil understanding of the milieus of the countryside, considerably pushing the Otherness of the rural folks. Only few actors walk away, unscathed. Rasika Duggal retains her luminescence, and Shahana Goswami lights up every scene she is in with a mischievous spark. As Maan , Ishaan Khatter is insouciant, often foolish, giving in to feckless urges. He’s hopelessly impulsive, dashes to swift decisions based on instant emotions. As Saeeda Bai, Tabu creates a striking portrait of grand, profound melancholy and wistfulness, combining an exquisite grace with an ache containing multitudes. To Saaeda, abuse and being used and manipulated is a familiar thing, and she uses her art as reprieve for her grief which she expresses sparingly. As much as I was fascinated by Saaeda, I was aware that the series was narrating from the perspective of someone who’s desperately trying to peek into this rich courtesan tradition, never managing to offer much insight into the macros of it all. Nair doesn’t explore Saaeda with much attentiveness. The many complex angles to the feverishly volatile romance between Maan and Saeeda are casually excised . I also loved Shubham Saraf as Firoz , Maan’s closest friend; here, Nair suggests subtly a homoerotic angle, with archaic notion of flicking rose petals off each other. Shubham is just so lovely I wish there was more of him and while watching, I prayed fervently the relationship between the two friends gets more tender moments but that never arrives. Of the suitors, Namit Das as Haresh puts in the most endearing, fleshed out performance and Danesh Razvi as Kabir beyond his charismatic looks becomes bland. As Lata, Tanya Maniktala is mostly always charming, but that indefatigable smile and sparkle needed to be latched onto more diverse mood inflection which is why her performance quickly turns into just another serviceable act. Her buoyancy lacks a certain complexity that belies her basic predicament. Mira has said for umpteen times the series is her ode to the composite, syncretic culture of India but the viewer is just handed a very basic, nuance free expansion on her intentions. In the mapping of the immense communal disquiet of the time, it barely makes any remarkable point , only stumbling into the usual narrative moments of the Hindu boy saving his Muslim friend.
In fact time constraints and the intimidating largesse of material at hand has never reflected so explicitly in any recent series like it does in this. A Suitable Boy lurches from one crisis to the other; we are only comfortably settled in one situation than we are yanked out and planted in some other remote circumstance in the village. The editing is so bafflingly random in hopping across the various narrative strands it compounds the multiple problems in the viewer’s emotional engagement with a set of characters. I almost felt the primary anxieties that the writer must have had while choosing which plot points to zoom in on , which is an early and sure sign of a hugely ineffectual adaptation.
Then there are Kavita Seth’s ghazals, all seven original compositions done by her ,drawn from the works of Ameer Minai and Dagh Delvi, which are a thing of triumphant glory, beauty and sheer power. Though the way the ghazals are used or filmed are very uninventive , the sadness inherent in Saaeda’s being envelops the viewer completely. What ultimately stayed with me the most were Seth’s magnificent renditions, for days on end I kept humming :
महफ़िल बरख़ास्त है पतंगे
रुख़्सत शम्ओं’ से हो रहे हैं
है कोच का वक़्त आसमाँ पर
तारे कहीं नाम को रहे हैं
उन की भी नुमूद है कोई दम
वो भी न रहेंगे जो रहे हैं
दुनिया का ये रंग और हम को
कुछ होश नहीं है सो रहे हैं ….
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